Restoring Interior Life: The Role of Silence and Reflection

Practising Catholic and social scientist Arthur C. Brooks has been warning that the modern appetite for constant stimulation is hollowing out attention, reflection and human relationships. Some of his neuroscience is too confidently stated. His larger point is harder to dismiss, and for Catholics it raises an older question than the smartphone itself: what becomes of the interior life when silence is no longer tolerated?

Arthur C. Brooks began a recent conversation with Winston Marshall with a statistic calculated to make almost anyone reach for his own telephone: the average American, he said, checks a mobile phone 205 times a day. The figure comes from a 2025 consumer survey rather than a national health study, so it ought not to be freighted with more scientific authority than it deserves. Even so, its plausibility is part of the problem. A device checked two hundred times in a day is not merely a tool occasionally consulted. It has become part of the rhythm by which the day itself is experienced. The question is no longer simply how many hours are “spent on the phone”, as though the matter were reducible to wasted leisure. The more interesting question is what disappears when almost every idle interval is immediately occupied.

Brooks is especially worth hearing because he is not approaching the subject as a secular psychologist who has discovered that religion may possess therapeutic value. He is a practising Catholic. In the same interview he describes attending Mass almost every morning, praying the Rosary with his wife in the evening and falling asleep while repeating the Jesus Prayer. When the conversation turns to suffering, he reaches instinctively for Gethsemane. None of this proves his behavioural arguments, but it tells us what kind of argument he is trying to make. He is interested in distraction not simply because it damages productivity or makes people unhappy, but because he has come to see the habit of perpetual stimulation as hostile to the sort of attention upon which a serious interior life depends.²

He uses the word “boredom”, which is serviceable enough for a popular interview but spiritually imprecise. Catholic ascetical theology has never regarded boredom as a virtue. What Brooks describes at the natural level — periods in which external stimulation recedes and the mind is permitted to remember, associate, wonder and think — has a close analogue in what the Church’s spiritual tradition calls recollection. They are not the same thing. Mind-wandering is not mental prayer, and an activated default mode network is not contemplation. Yet a man who has trained himself to answer every unoccupied moment with a stimulus is plainly making the work of recollection more difficult. The Catholic masters of prayer needed no functional brain imaging to know that the senses scatter the mind, that the imagination can become unruly, and that prayer requires a degree of custody over both.

The neuroscience behind Brooks’s argument is strongest when it remains modest. The so-called default mode network is a well-established set of interacting brain regions associated with internally directed cognition, including autobiographical memory, self-referential thought, imagination, social cognition and spontaneous mental activity.³ It is not a “meaning centre”, and Brooks occasionally speaks as though the relationship were more direct than the evidence permits. Yet he is right about the underlying phenomenon. When the mind is no longer being driven by an immediate external task, it does not simply shut down. It begins to do other work. Human beings remember, rehearse, imagine, interpret and integrate. Some of that is trivial and some of it can become unhealthy rumination; some of it is also the ordinary mental space in which experience is assimilated rather than merely accumulated.

Modern technology has become extraordinarily efficient at closing that space. The queue stalls; the telephone comes out. The train stops between stations; the telephone comes out. Someone leaves the table for ninety seconds; the telephone comes out. The kettle boils, a webpage loads, a meeting finishes early, a lift takes twenty seconds longer than expected. The action is by now so ordinary that it hardly registers as a decision. Brooks’s concern is that what appears to be a thousand insignificant acts of convenience may amount to a habit of refusing silence whenever silence presents itself.

He recommends deliberately reversing that habit. Exercise without headphones. Travel without automatically supplying another stream of content. Look out of the window. Read something and then leave time to think about it. Brooks speaks of the need for “white space” in which thought can ripen instead of being displaced by more input.⁴ The advice is almost comically simple, which may be why it now sounds radical. A culture which has learned to equate an unoccupied mind with a wasted opportunity is unlikely to understand immediately why anyone would choose not to be entertained, informed or contacted for ten minutes.

Catholicism has a better account of what those ten minutes might be for. St Paul’s “Pray without ceasing” is not an instruction to generate continuous verbal activity, still less to turn prayer into a background soundtrack.⁵ Our Lord’s command to enter into the chamber and pray to the Father in secret describes an act of withdrawal from the public and the immediately demanding.⁶ The spiritual tradition built upon it understood that exterior quiet and interior quiet are related. One does not mechanically produce the other, but the soul constantly dragged towards novelty will not easily acquire the habit of standing still before God.

This is already familiar ground for Nuntiatoria. In Quaerite Primum Regnum Dei, the editorial for CXXI asked where silence is still understood “not as absence but as adoration”, while the accompanying spiritual conference located the decisive battlefield in the interior life, where intellect, memory, imagination, appetite and will are brought beneath the rule of Christ and where mental prayer becomes, in an old and exact phrase, “an audience with the King”.⁷ Brooks approaches that same problem through behavioural science rather than spiritual theology. His usefulness is not that neuroscience has discovered recollection. It is that the modern machinery of distraction has become so pervasive that even the natural prerequisites for recollection can no longer be taken for granted.

His own practice makes the point more effectively than the theory. Brooks recounts his use of the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” — at night, drawing upon The Way of a Pilgrim and its meditation upon the Pauline injunction to pray without ceasing. He speaks also of Mass and the evening Rosary, and says plainly that these practices have altered his relationship with God.⁸ There is nothing particularly novel here. That is precisely why it is important. The alternative to a life governed by digital interruption does not have to be another system, app, method or productivity regime. For a Catholic it may consist in recovering ordinary acts which were already there: Mass, vocal prayer, mental prayer, spiritual reading, silence, the Rosary, examination of conscience, a walk taken without electronic accompaniment.

The smartphone itself is not the enemy. It would be absurd for a publication distributed electronically to pretend otherwise. Technology has made possible forms of communication, evangelisation, education and pastoral reach that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. The housebound can follow the Mass. Catholics separated by continents can speak daily. Priests can teach dispersed congregations. Scripture, patristic texts, missals and theological works can be consulted in seconds. The moral question begins when the instrument ceases to be merely available and starts to set the terms upon which attention is given.

That distinction matters especially for Catholics because religious content is no protection against religious distraction. It is perfectly possible to consume several hours of sermons, apologetics, Church news and ecclesiastical controversy while failing to pray. One may know every development from Rome, every disputed episcopal quotation and every fresh liturgical argument, yet have allowed no serious silence in which any of it is judged before God. There is a form of Catholic media consumption which resembles study but is really agitation. It supplies more and more information while leaving less and less room for wisdom.

Brooks makes a similar point about reading. He is sceptical of the boast that one reads several books a week if nothing is ever allowed to settle. The observation is sound. Intellectual life does not consist in moving the greatest possible quantity of material past the eyes. A serious book continues working upon the mind after it has been closed. Ideas are compared, resisted, remembered, related to other ideas and eventually incorporated into judgement. The technological environment rewards the opposite habit: once one item has been consumed, another waits beneath it. The mind is never forced to starve, but neither is it necessarily allowed to digest.

The Church has long possessed a more demanding account of intellectual freedom. Knowledge is not identical with information, and wisdom is not measured by volume. St Thomas’s treatment of contemplation is concerned with truth apprehended and loved, not with intellectual throughput. The same is true of prayer. No quantity of devotional material can substitute for an act of religion. A Rosary is not more valuable because one has simultaneously listened to a podcast about the Rosary. A meditation is not deepened merely because it was preceded by twenty commentaries on meditation. At some point one has to stop receiving material and turn the mind towards God.

This also explains why the physiological effects of prayer, interesting though they are, must be kept in their place. A frequently cited study in the British Medical Journal found that recitation of the Ave Maria in Latin slowed respiration to about six breaths per minute and affected heart-rate variability and baroreflex sensitivity.⁹ Such findings are useful, particularly in a culture inclined to suppose that ancient devotional practices are irrational leftovers from a pre-scientific age. But the Rosary is not vindicated because it has measurable autonomic effects. Catholics do not say the Ave Maria in order to optimise cardiovascular rhythms. The mysteries of the Rosary concern the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord; the physiological calm that may accompany the prayer is incidental to its supernatural purpose.

Brooks himself appears to understand the distinction. He does not describe his Catholic practices principally as stress-management. He says they have deepened his relationship with God. That is a much more important claim. It places prayer where Catholic theology has always placed it: under the virtue of religion, as an act directed towards God rather than towards the management of the self.

The problem of attention becomes more acute when children are involved. Brooks argues strongly against smartphones in classrooms and against social-media access for the young. The evidence here needs more discrimination than some popular accounts permit. The deterioration in adolescent mental health is real; the rise of smartphones and social media is also real; the causal relationship between every component of the two is much harder to establish cleanly. The United States Surgeon General concluded that the evidence is insufficient to regard social media as safe for children and adolescents, while also acknowledging substantial gaps concerning causation, patterns of use and individual susceptibility.¹¹ That is serious enough without pretending that one device explains every difficulty experienced by a generation.

The educational evidence is less ambiguous on a narrower point. A 2025 meta-analysis of 27 randomised experiments involving 2,245 participants found a medium negative effect from mobile-phone distraction upon immediate recall, with a larger effect in lecture settings.¹² A pupil looking repeatedly at a device learns less of what is being taught. This hardly requires a revolution in neuroscience to comprehend. Attention divided is attention diminished.

Brooks’s claims about post-Covid personality change deserve the same restraint. A major longitudinal study of American adults did find measurable changes during the pandemic period, particularly among younger adults, including increased neuroticism and reductions in agreeableness and conscientiousness. The authors did not establish that these changes were permanent.¹⁰ Brooks sometimes speaks as though permanence were already demonstrated, then elsewhere concedes that it is not known. The cautious version is sufficient. The combination of social isolation, disrupted schooling and digitally mediated relationships had consequences which did not evaporate instantly when restrictions ended. What will endure remains a matter for evidence rather than prophecy.

His weakest scientific passage is the familiar left-brain/right-brain account. Brooks contrasts an analytical, informational left hemisphere with a relational and meaning-seeking right hemisphere, using the distinction to explain why relationships mediated through screens may feel thinner than those lived face to face. There are real hemispheric asymmetries, but the popular model of the logical left brain opposed to the creative, emotional or intuitive right brain is far too crude. Complex social understanding recruits distributed systems across both hemispheres. Corballis’s useful review of the subject dismantles much of the popular mythology without denying genuine lateralisation.¹³ Brooks does not need the mythology. The ordinary human difference between being physically present to another person and exchanging data through a device is substantial enough.

Catholic anthropology, indeed, gives a firmer reason for resisting the fantasy that mediated contact can replace presence indefinitely. Man is embodied. Friendship, family life, courtship, common worship, teaching and pastoral care are not relations between two disembodied centres of information. Gesture, silence, physical presence, expression, tone, awkwardness, patience and the innumerable unplanned details of being with another person form part of human communion. Technology can sustain a relationship across distance; it cannot abolish the significance of the body without falsifying the creature using it.

The practical answer belongs to an older vocabulary than digital wellness. Mortification is the deliberate refusal to let every appetite dictate an action. In this case it may be very small: leaving the telephone outside the room during prayer; going for a walk without headphones; eating without watching a screen; resisting the urge to check a notification while another person is speaking; allowing a train journey to remain a train journey. None of these acts is heroic. Their value lies precisely in their ordinariness. They recover the faculty of saying no to an impulse which has become so familiar that many people no longer experience it as an impulse at all.

The point is not to become a digital minimalist for aesthetic reasons. It is to recover freedom over a created good. Nuntiatoria CXXI placed that problem where it belongs when it returned to Our Lord’s command to seek first the Kingdom of God.¹⁴ Catholic moral theology does not require us to despise means; it requires means to remain ordered to their proper ends. A telephone used for work, friendship, study or evangelisation is serving a human purpose. A telephone which must be consulted because silence has become intolerable is beginning to reveal a different relation between master and servant.

Our Lord’s warning that “no man can serve two masters” concerns God and mammon, not digital technology.¹⁵ It would be exegetically careless to pretend otherwise. The moral principle nevertheless remains useful: created things cannot be allowed to occupy the place of final goods. When a device begins to determine the first waking moments of the day, the last minutes before sleep, the handling of anxiety, the filling of every pause and the terms upon which attention is given to other people, there is sufficient reason for examination of conscience.

Brooks becomes most recognisably Catholic when the conversation turns from distraction to suffering. He rejects the increasingly common tendency to treat every unpleasant interior state as pathology and argues that pain can disclose meaning. His formula that suffering is “pain multiplied by resistance to pain” belongs to a psychological school of thought and should not be mistaken for a theological definition. More importantly, he turns to Christ in Gethsemane, to the prayer that the chalice might pass and the submission of the human will to the will of the Father.¹⁶

Here, however, psychology reaches its limit. Gethsemane is not the story of a man who discovered a healthier attitude towards unavoidable pain. The agony belongs to the redemptive obedience of the Incarnate Son: “Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from me: but yet not my will, but thine be done.”¹⁷ Christian suffering acquires its meaning through Christ, not through resilience as such. “If we suffer, we shall also reign with him.”¹⁸ That does not make pain good in itself, and it certainly does not forbid Christians from relieving suffering where they can. It does mean that suffering cannot be treated as an unintelligible interruption to a life whose only proper condition is comfort.

That theological point brings Brooks’s argument about distraction into sharper focus. A culture trained to escape discomfort immediately will find silence difficult because silence is not always pleasant. It will find examination of conscience difficult because truth about oneself can hurt. It will find mortification unintelligible because appetite has been taught to expect satisfaction. It will find suffering scandalous because it possesses no transcendent end by which pain can be interpreted. The smartphone did not create these tendencies, but it has become a remarkably effective instrument for serving them. There is always another item to read, another message to answer, another video to watch, another argument to enter, another piece of noise available before the interior question has time to become troublesome.

That is the real strength of Brooks’s intervention. The Church does not need neuroscience to justify silence, nor behavioural science to discover prayer. What his work makes plain is how systematically modern life is training people away from the ordinary human conditions in which silence, reflection and prayer become possible. The older ascetical vocabulary — custody of the senses, recollection, examination, mortification, meditation — begins to look unexpectedly contemporary because it addresses precisely the problem which digital culture has made harder to ignore.

Brooks ends his day in a way which says more than many theories about attention. Rather than allowing another stream of content to accompany him into sleep, he repeats the Holy Name. His phone can supply practically limitless novelty; he chooses a prayer known in substance for centuries. There is no technological programme to implement, no fashionable spirituality to acquire and no complicated technique to master. The Christian answer to a culture of endless interruption may begin with something much less impressive: enough silence to remember that one is in the presence of God.

For many Catholics, that may be the most useful mortification of the week. Put the telephone down before it asks to be put down. Leave the next few minutes unfilled. Then pray.